REStRAIN: Conceptualization of Agile Process Tools Integration with Reference to the Aerospace Industry

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a framework that integrates engineering software and agile tools based on ontologies and business rules. The aim of this integration is to help project managers specify their own rules of integration between development software and agile tools. This integration circumvents the limitations of on-the-shelf plugins that perform a very basic integration that not only fails to satisfy the complex needs of project managers but also provides insufficient customization possibilities. A formalization of the domain knowledge ontology and its extension are presented. A generic integration algorithm is presented, and some of its performance properties are detailed. To examine the application and validation of the framework, it is deployed for the integration of spacecraft data definition software with issue management systems. This deployment shows how project managers can specify the integration rules that give them the appropriate feedback information at project level after spacecraft data updates. The evaluation of the framework is conducted at two stages. At the time of design, the usability of the framework is evaluated, and it is shown that the general usability criterion is 4.15 on a Likert-type five-point response scale. Additionally, a comparison with on-the-shelf integration plugins shows that less cognitive effort is required from project managers to customize the presented framework integration rules. At run time, the execution time of the presented framework integration algorithm is evaluated. This evaluation shows that even for updates of large data files on the development software, the agile tools are updated following project managers’ integration rules in a reasonable time.